Without meaning to, I slept in this morning. I woke up an hour and a half after I normally do on Wednesdays and cursed the covers as I missed my mid-week training session.

However, it gave me some extra time to sleep, recover and think about jiu jitsu in my life, throughout the day.

Jiu jitsu, like life, presents us with a series of problems and it’s our job to solve them in order to move forward. Currently, those problems for me look something like this:

– How do I deal with Ben’s weight when he’s on top of me?

– What do I do when my underhook is collapsed in half-guard in order to prevent the Darce choke?

– How do I get deeper into my half guard?

– How many different ways can I set up X Guard to work the sweeps that I’m beginning to learn?

In the moment, the problems are obviously different. Those end up being positional and fleeting. Defense, survival, transition, keeping position, submission. All of them are, in and of themselves, their own problems.

All of that to say, I had an epiphany today while watching a wingsuit video. In it, the jumper says, “Solving the problem elegantly – it’s such a tremendous joy” and that statement resonated in me like a bell.

In jiu jitsu, our goals are not just to solve the problem, but to solve the problems elegantly.